Betrothed side-story

He had given up hope on having a good family life.

He was destined to be alone, his very presence a cause of death.

Grief lingered on his skin.

The laughter had faded from his eyes.

Sometimes he woke in the morning and didn’t want to get out of bed. Terrified of living the rest of his own life.

His parents were constant in their insistence that he marry and have children. They wanted a legitimate heir.

But all of his wives kept dying.

They would barely enter his house, and then they would be dead.

Never by his hand, as the rumors suggested, but it kept happening and he remained without a wife, much less a lifemate.

He imagined what it would be like in the future, all alone, his parents long gone.

And it was a scary prospect. Because all the dead wives had resulted in his friends distancing themselves from him.

He knew it wasn’t their fault. They had to follow the orders of their parents. And their parents didn’t want to risk their precious family lines being disrupted by a school friend that seemed to have been cursed by the heavens.

And he was beginning to believe that he was cursed.

Otherwise, how could he have so many dead wives?

dead wives vs dead brides: I figure a wife is someone that’s been married and has moved into the life. A bride is the transition phase between a fiancée and a wife.

He’d been through four weddings and four funerals. Had witnessed joy turn to grief four times and it had wrecked something in him.

Whenever he’d thought of his adult life, he’d imagined a happy home. A nest for children to grow, and then a warm companionship that would last him until he was weak with old.

Because that was what had scared him his whole life: getting old.

He’d been made to visit elderly relatives once. Tiny and vulnerable, he had wandered into the wrong room and had seen the oldest person he had ever seen then or since. Someone he now realized had been on the brink of death. That all-pervasive odor had sunk into the fabric of his skin as he’d stood in that room. As his delicate hand was grasped and he was pulled close to the bed.

Mistaken as a beloved grandchild that had long since grown to adulthood and ceased to visit, he had wanted to cry but had been too petrified to make a sound.

Had listened to the desperate last wishes and demands for promises that belonged to other people.

That whispery, gasping, despairing voice had made its way into his memory along with the image of those staring eyes.

And ever after he was terrified of becoming old.

Of withering into his skin. Of forgetting who he was.

It had made the prospect of marriage seem like a sweet idea.

To not be left alone in a house, fallen to the floor. Body broken as the bits and pieces shifted, grinded, and shattered with age. Ligaments tearing and cartilage melting and shifting away, leaving bone to grind on bone.

When he let himself think of growing old, he would put himself into a dark head space. The more he thought of himself becoming old and what it might be like, the more he would linger on that image and sound from his memory. Would feel the sense of being trapped in the cage that was his own skeleton.

Desperate to share his last thoughts lest they be lost forever.

He’d always thought that at least if he were married, there would be someone to find him. Help him. Take him to the hospital if he needed to go.

Someone legally obligated to make sure that he received medical care.

And he had always thought that he would make sure they understood that they would be fully compensated for their companionship. There would be no cash incentive to have him murdered.

He wanted to live the whole of his life.

He was terrified of being old.

But he was also scared of never getting old.

Of having his life cut short against his will.

Of having even a last few minutes snatched from his hands.

He was scared of being old, not because of the sense of decay and decrepitude, but because he didn’t want to be shuffled to some back room in the house. Never visited. Never thought of. Cold, clinical hands solving the issues of his body, shifting him this way and that to prevent sores, changing tubes, dealing with his bodily waste. But never visited by anyone that had known him when he was young.

His parents were going to die someday.

Every wrinkle on their face gave him a sense of dread.

Of the looming emptiness of the house. The grief and loneliness and talking to people that had never called him by his family nickname.

He didn’t want to be old and helpless and surrounded by people that didn’t know him as he was now.

With every wife, he lived with the hope that they would talk to his mother and listen to his father. That they would be told stories of his childhood and youth, and the stories would be speckled with his nickname throughout. That his mother’s warm drawl would be internalized and his father’s unspoken warmth would be recognized.

He didn’t know what it would be like to be old and helpless and surrounded by strangeness, and there would be nobody that personally remembered his parents the way that he did.

He wasn’t just scared of losing himself. He was afraid of losing the family he already had.

He wanted a wife to add to his family. To maybe have children, and if not, to at least have the companionship of someone to take walks with. To wander through the grocery store. To talk about books and movies and the pop culture of their youth when they became so old that the people around them were unable to understand their references.

He was afraid of being old because he associated it with being alone.

Of being tucked away in a darkened room that reeked of imminent death. Of being so lost that he would mistake a stranger for someone that he knew and revealing his deepest secrets while demanding impossible promises.

He didn’t want to have such fear of issues unresolved that it glowed from his eyes. Frantic large pupils jiggling around uncontrollably as he begged for his last regrets to be solved.

He’d never learned that person’s name. Had been too young to remember even if he was told.

But that face and those eyes and that whispery voice…

He was afraid of being alone when he was old.

And his fear had seen the death of four young women.

Not by his hands. But by whatever odd curse and horrible happenstance was surrounding him. The miasma of death that he somehow carried around with him.

Like a madness under the skin.

~Harper Kingsley

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